THE ORIGINS OF VATSLAW LASTOWSKI’S VIEWS ON PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Abstract

The article presents the most recent results in the study of Vatslaw Lastowski’s views on philosophy of history. Despite not being a systematic thinker but rather a publicist, he developed an outline of a methodology of national historiography which was based on the concept of national style and a classification of national values. His method combines certain aspects of primordialism, historicism, and even modernist constructivism in order to overcome the insufficiencies and theoretical difficulties of individual respective approaches. According to Lastowski, history is not only a science of the past but also a way of national self-understanding, since nation is seen as a community of shared historical experience. Therefore, the task of historian is to provide a ‘mirror image’ in which a nation can truly recognize its individuality and political agency. It is shown that being fundamentally cultural, Lastowski’s nationalism develops a specific understanding of politics as a sphere among others within the whole of national culture. The article abides by general principles
of scientific historicism as historical contextualism and therefore considers Lastowski’s works within the intellectual context of his epoch. Specifically, his theoretical dependence on positivism, social-democratic literature and German neo-Kantian philosophy is demonstrated. The origin of Lastowski’s concept of national style is traced to the article of Ukrainian social-democratic author Vadym Shcherbakivskyi. Finally, the connection between Lastowski’s classification of national values and the work of Werner Sombart, explicitly mentioned by Lastowski as a point of reference, is analyzed. Overall Lastowski’s oeuvre appears to be a fruitful source of inspiration for the contemporary debates on methodology of history of oppressed, stateless, and/or previously colonized nations, while its study reveals some important and often neglected conceptual difficulties of Belarusian and Eastern European intellectual history.